Let me tell you about the worst client in the music business. Guy’s been a star for thirty years. Doesn’t do the press circuit — not the podcast rounds, not the explainers, not the brand summits. (He did sit for a long RA Exchange last year, which is essential listening — but that’s the exception that proves the rule.)
Quick: picture a jazz band. I’ll bet you pictured a dim basement, a beret, and four men politely ignoring each other. Now throw that picture away, because Ezra Collective are the first jazz act ever to sell out Wembley Arena, and nobody in that building was being polite about anything.
Ezra Collective are five Londoners — drummer and bandleader Femi Koleoso, his brother TJ on bass, Joe Armon-Jones on keys, Ife Ogunjobi on trumpet, and James Mollison on sax — who met as teenagers in Tomorrow’s Warriors, the youth jazz program that has quietly become the most important talent pipeline in British music.
There is a particular type of silence that lives in South London.
At 2 a.m. — buses sighing past shuttered chicken shops, foxes conducting urgent business in wheelie bins, the whole borough exhales. BEASTIE makes music that sounds like that silence decided, briefly, to sing.
His name is Kamal. He is from Mitcham, which — for the uninitiated — is the part of South London that estate agents describe as “up-and-coming” and everyone else describes as “home.”
Here’s a fun party trick for the streaming era: name the most prolific, most decorated, most argued-about British band of the last seven years, then try to describe what any of them look like. Go on. I’ll wait.
You can’t. That’s the whole point. SAULT — pronounced like the thing you put on chips, spelled like a password — is a London collective that has released thirteen studio albums since 2019, been nominated for a Mercury Prize, won an Ivor Novello, headlined All Points East with a five-hour set, and done it all while treating fame the way a cat treats a bath: with total, principled refusal.
After the release of their impressive debut album “Touch” Melbourne synth-pop duo GL are back with a new double-A side single “Destiny/Reflect”. The record’s A-side cut “Destiny” finds the duo of Ella Thompson and Graeme Pogson delivering a sumptuous slice of analogue synth-pop just in time for summer. They are quoted saying, it’s a track about “looking for the positives and finding happiness in those around us.”
Travis Scott announced the “Birds Eye View” tour today. The tour looks to be an exciting one off of Travis Scott’s most recent album Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight. The tour is set to feature shows across the US and Germany and is sure to be full of energy. Travis Scott has created a reputation for putting on great shows with non-stop action and should definitely be an artist on your must-see list this summer.
